E175 – What are Some Ways to Test and Improve CTR From Google and Bing

All businesses want more traffic. You work your tail off to make Page 1 and then more time to get into Top 3 and maybe even #1. But the traffic never comes? Maybe you have a horribly low CTR but solid conversions?

This episode will dig into some tests, some resources and some ideas on what you can do to improve your own CTR in Google and Bing.

Improving CTR Resources

And the a deeper dive by Aleyda can be found at her recent article that talks about this exact topic - improving CTR. As we talk about in the episode, notice the first step in the flow chart? Is the page relevant?

Before you even worry about your CTR, take a look at your page and make sure they are relevant.

Not SEO but we have seen people test emojis in Title Tags and some interesting data non the less. SEJ did a big test of their emails for a month, Emojis in Email Subject Lines: Do They Affect Open Rates? [DATA] and reported on their findings - some good, some bad but all somewhat interesting.

At Moz there is also the recent article and test Title Tags SEO: When to Include Your Brand and/or Boilerplate which is another test and angle around improving your CTR.

Professional vs. Increasing CTR

Whatever you do or test, how will things impact your brand? Will using ALL CAPS or emojis make your brand look bad, childish, amatuer or will it have no effect?

No matter what you test, note the Moz study in all the things they watched. How do the changes you make impact rankings, clicks, impressions and even conversions. Do you get more clicks but not more conversions. Is that good traffic? Or what if you get less clicks but more conversions? What is your goal?

Follow the Pack but Know When to Hang a Left

If you were to target "canva alternatives" and notice that everyone has a list that includes a number - think what you can do to be slightly different.

They list numbers - can you have more or less?Instead of a list of ALL, what are the 3 best?What can you do differently?Is the query even relevant to you? Is the page ranking relevant?Test everything.Add brand. Remove brand. Try different call outs. Remove call outs.

Full Transcript

Matt Siltala: [00:00:00] Welcome to another exciting episode of the business of digital podcast, featuring your host, Matt  and Dave roar. Are you guys excited to have you join us on another one of these exciting podcast episodes? We've got Dave over there. How's it going? Dave? Dave

Dave Rohrer: [00:00:18] is here.

Matt Siltala: [00:00:18] All right. So

Dave Rohrer: [00:00:20] present and accounted for

Matt Siltala: [00:00:24] gotcha.

Well, let's just jump into it. So today, I don't know if this came from a tweet that you saw or an article that you read, but the title that we're going with right now, guys is ways to test and improve your organic CTR. And so, maybe Dave just kind of set us up and, and, what made you think of this one?

And we'll go from there. Well, it

Dave Rohrer: [00:00:47] come from, a test I did with a client last November, December, and then I'm working with a client right now where we just did something in recent weeks. And we're already seeing, bumps and jumps and [00:01:00] traffic and impressions and clicks and rankings, but it's working on and improving your CTR from Google and being, and, you know, you'll.

You'll see tons of doomsday predictions and yes, we are seeing less clicks from organic traffic and even less organic opportunities. Yeah. okay. At least from a typical blue link, you know, you can have images and videos and you can, we can argue that separately, but we're just talking about, you know, your normal page, trying to get traffic from, you know, that number two, you are number one or number eight, listing on Google and being, how do I get more people to click, even if I'm a little bit further down.

Or number one, even how do I keep getting that high amount of traffic? And it came from that. But then I also saw, a lady did som